Boy, it’s dusty in here!! Been busy with lots of things, including just this week releasing The Hd Survival Handbook, but there was one thing from WWDC that caught my eye.
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone™, Snow Leopard introduces QuickTime X, which optimizes support for modern audio and video formats resulting in extremely efficient media playback. Snow Leopard also includes Safari® with the fastest implementation of JavaScript ever, increasing performance by 53 percent, making Web 2.0 applications feel more responsive.*
Now, I’m surprised at myself for even bothering to attempt to second guess Apple by hypothesizing wildly, but that doesn’t stop my friend James Gardiner so it won’t stop me!
There are few clues and most of my usual sources are cold. There’s the rub, anyone who has Snow Leopard is under NDA and won’t talk. Anyone who is talking is guessing – we should keep that in mind.
Tim Robertson hopes that “modern codec support” would include .AVI, which is funny because .AVI has not been developed since being abandoned by Microsoft in 1996 – 12 years ago, just after QuickTime was introduced! James Gardiner thinks it might be a Flash/Silverlight competitor. Who knows they could be right as we’re all guessing wildly.
In Apple’s world “Modern codec support” means H.264 in .mp4 wrappers, and just maybe H.264 in .mov wrappers but that’s depricated as they say. (You can still use it but it’s not the recommended method.) Apple have totally moved away from all the rich interactive features that attracted me to the technology in the first place. (Much of what was added to Flash 9, was available in QT3 but never pushed by Apple.)
Then there’s this on Apple’s Snow Leopard page
Using media technology pioneered in OS X iPhone…
The media playback support on iPhone is very basic: H.264 video, AAC audio, MPEG-4 Simple Profile video, mp3 in .mp4 containers with limited support for .mov playback of those codecs. That’s it. A simplified form of media player with none of the older codecs not supported by MPEG-4. None of the wired sprite features, no VT objects or panoramas. A simple, lightweight media player that developers can draw on. (I should note that Flash Player and Adobe Media Player now support those exact same codecs.)
Looking also at what Apple have been doing with Javascript, and knowing there’s already limited Javascript support in QuickTime, my further guess is that QT X will be very open to Javascript, Apple’s new favorite browser language thanks to Sproutcore and the new Webkit Javascript engineSquirelfish. It’s interesting that Apple announced QuickTime X and the new Javascript engine for Safari in Snow Leopard in the same paragraph. Other features went into separate paragraphs.
So my guess is that QuickTime X is a newly optimized media player engine with hooks to good Javascript for interactive programming. Perhaps even to Ruby/Ruby on Rails since Apple’s also adopting that.
But who knows for sure? Only those who can’t tell.